It was a famous World Cup victory for England and made for thoroughly enjoyable television. Technically, women's cricket is elevated by an alluring athletic trimness and a winsome charm and precision; if the men's game is ever-more reliant on the slam and slug of tree-trunk bats, the distaff side celebrate nimble footwork and straight-batted placement that evoke the willow-wand days of such as Hobbs and Hendren and Headley.

I'm aware that males sounding off on women's sport too readily triggers charges of patronising chauvinism. Years ago the Observer sent the game's finest essayist, RC Robertson-Glasgow, to a women's Test match and after drooling at delighted length about flighted top-class spin bowling and elbow-up textbook-pure off-driving, even he couldn't, in the end, resist presuming the slip-fielders' chat "centred on hats and cookery, or other matters of adornment and reflection".

Thirty-odd years ago, Sir Len Hutton, was persuaded to turn up to a charity match at Chislehurst. When the then England women's captain, Rachael Heyhoe Flint, passed us in the pavilion as she went out to bat, the deadpan old deadbat knight offered me a despairing stare and muttered: "Well, s'pose it's like a man tryin' t'knit, isn't it?"

The Women's Cricket Association was officially formed at a meeting in London in October 1926 – 19 votes for, one against (a Miss Brown of Cobham, whose objections were not minuted). By apt fluke this 2009 World Cup marked a notable jubilee: it is 75 years since an intrepid bunch set sail from Tilbury in 1934 for an inaugural tour of Australia. The Times saw them off on the SS Cathay with a horrified "end-this-shame" editorial: "Do not forget that these women are, after all, women, and it does not seem quite nice to think that they are future mothers charged with a responsibility of setting an example of gentleness, refinement, and restraint to the coming generation."

England's 22-year old luminary on that first unbeaten Australian adventure was, happily, to become a friend and neighbour of mine in the last couple of decades of her life. Myrtle Maclagan was both opening bat and demon spin bowler. In the first Test at Brisbane, she scored 72 and took seven for 10. In the second at Sydney she made 119, the first Test century by a woman. England's men had lost their Ashes that summer of 1934, so Myrtle's feats had the Morning Post crowing back home:

No matter that we lost, mere nervy

men,

Since England's women now play

England's game,

Wherefore Immortal Wisden take

your pen

And write MACLAGAN on the scroll

of fame

Fully 50 years on and Myrtle couldn't remember anything about that Sydney innings except, vividly still, the shot with which she reached the century – "only because a pressman gave me a framed photograph of it, oh yes, a full-flowing cover-drive for four, real Wally Hammond-stuff, you know." And the laughter would crackle – for Myrtle Maclagan, think a cross between a chuckling down-to-earth Ann Widdecombe and a no-nonsense officer-class Judi Dench. Without a pause, Myrtle could rat-a-tat the names and jobs of all her fellow tourists 75 years ago: "All of us under 25 – me in the women's army, seven of us teachers or teachers-to-be, two secretaries, one art student, one lawyer, one nurse, and three who 'did nothing', you know, ladies of leisure. What fun, what laughter, what scrapes, all for one, one for all; most men were scared of us, I daresay, especially Australian men."

She still had the printed set of rules imposed on the Australian team when they had embarked on a return visit in 1937: "No player may drink, smoke or gamble. No girl shall ever be accompanied by a man. On board ship no girl shall visit the Top Deck after dinner. The team shall have all retired to bed by 10pm." Mercifully, chortled Myrtle, her England team had imposed nothing of that sort on themselves.

She ended her army career as MBE and head of PT for all Britain's Women's Royal Army Corps. Her last innings, at 52, was for the Combined Services against the 1963 Australian tourists. She scored 81 – same age at which she was to die, hearty, hale, bushy-tailed and bright-eyed to the last, in 1993. Her trusty 1930s Gunn & Moore, teak-brown and twine-bound, permanently stood just inside the front door of her blissful Surrey cottage, ready to repel. So many turned up for her 80th birthday party that she made her speech from the top of a stepladder, having shrilly blown a whistle to gain attention. Having heard the news from Australia, Myrtle probably did something similarly cheerful up there in heaven on Sunday.